


eyes in the moon of blindness

by trell (qunlat)



Category: One Piece
Genre: Formalwear, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-18
Updated: 2015-11-18
Packaged: 2018-05-02 04:19:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5233862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qunlat/pseuds/trell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Strawhat blinks owlishly at him from where he’s perched on the edge of the bed. Breath caught, Law manages, “How do I look?”</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	eyes in the moon of blindness

He makes a point of not thinking about it while he dresses.

It’s quick enough. The crisp white shirt buttoned—top three buttons left undone—the belt slid through the loops of the dress pants, the suit jacket pulled on. No cufflinks or ties, just the shirt collar tugged out from underneath that of the jacket; and, after a moment, the sleeves rolled up past the elbow, the white shirtsleeves underneath folded carefully over them, showing the spike-ringed tattoos underneath. 

He gets that far without thinking about it, mostly by virtue of avoiding the walk-in closet's mirror. When he finishes and glances up—

It’s been a decade since he’d last dressed like this, and he’d been far smaller. Stood hardly to his present-day shoulder, been even scrawnier, had his hair longer. Already gangly by then, he hadn’t yet reached his growth spurt; years to go before he hit his final six-foot-five, started to loom over everyone.

(He’d spent the aftermath not knowing what to do with it, always too tall, impossible to miss in a crowd. It was only later that he figured out how to use it, how to make himself look menacing and severe.)

Back then, his hat had always covered his eyes and left only his grimace. He’d refused to let go of it even when dressed to the nines, tattered and filthy as it was; looking back his need to cling to something familiar strikes him as obvious, but he hadn’t thought of it that way then. Keeping it on wherever he went had simply been—a decision, one he’d made and wouldn’t go back on, his ground to stand on.

Never mind that it was all that he’d saved. 

The man he sees in the mirror looks too much like that boy he remembers. The pale splotches still stand out on his face—and his neck and his hands, and everywhere the suit doesn’t hide—the dark bags under his eyes still haven’t receded, eyes remain sunken. Even in his wrists the bones still look too sharp under the skin, some part of that specter-like look never shed. 

And maybe it shouldn’t surprise him, that he’s changed so little, or rather changed and changed back: dismantled then by his losses, dismantled again by his failure.

It’s been a long time since Dressrosa, but he’s still falling—hasn’t stopped falling since Joker flung him down after the coping saw bore through his shoulder, ended everything. He still doesn’t know where to find the person he used to be, doesn’t know how to put the pieces of him back together. He’s still—less, always less than he used to be, outside matching the hollow inside.

Worse, donning a suit again feels like a reversion, running back to everything Joker had meant for him to be. If he’d stayed he imagines he’d look just like this, get blood on his collar every time he acted as Joker’s right hand and wear the same manic smile. Or maybe he’d be the way he was when he was younger, teeth grit and jaw set without fail, anger that bled into violence always thrumming under his skin—

But there’s something else to it, too.

He looks at the way the black lines of the suit sharpen and broaden his narrow shoulders, the way the black emphasizes his height without making him tend towards gaunt. Thinks about what dressing this way used to mean: he’d been made to do it for meetings between the families, for violent power displays before subordinate crews and gangs, for every form of negotiation, bloody or not. He’d stood at Corazón’s back and Joker’s side and been fearless, fearsome, sure of his place.

Something of that feeling clings. A mental footnote, a connotation that he can’t shake off; old assurance where lately he's had—nothing.

He likes it, he realizes, and it’s not a good revelation. There’s nothing about that version of him he shouldn’t revile, nothing he shouldn’t run from. That there’s something to it he wants chills him, makes him wonder anew if all that twisted cruelty Joker taught settled inside him, lies in wait for its chance to come out.

A voice from outside the room cuts into his thoughts. “Torao,” whines Luffy, hardly any less loud for the door in between them, “aren’t you done yet?”

“I’m coming,” Law says, and gives one more tug to his open collar, swallows, turns and pulls the door into the larger room open.

Stepping into the brighter light doesn’t chase the dark thoughts away. He knows, in his rational mind, that Strawhat’s never seen him like this, has no foul associations; and still his stomach knots with an irrational certainty that there’s something he’ll see. A personality that comes with the clothes; a doppelgänger from the universe where he remained red right hand, right there inside him.

Strawhat blinks owlishly at him from where he’s perched on the edge of the bed. Breath caught, Law manages, “How do I look?”

It only takes Strawhat a moment of consideration. “Like yourself,” he supplies, and, “not like a doctor. But you never look like a doctor, so—like you.”

And just like that—just with a word; the tight anxiety in Law’s chest eases, the fear lessens, the memories running circles inside his skull slow in their stride.

Because Strawhat, for all his impulsiveness—for all that he’s got no filter at all between his mouth and his brain, for all that he never _thinks_ —he has a way of saying the very things Law needs to hear. That the words are unplanned makes them all the more genuine, none of that skipped beat it takes to spit out a lie: just him, just Luffy, just.

“Like me,” repeats Law. Runs his hands down the lapels of his unbuttoned jacket and breathes in, and breathes out, and thinks: if Strawhat doesn’t see the monster he carries, then maybe, just maybe, it isn’t there.

He trusts Luffy’s eyes more than his own, anyway.

“So,” says Strawhat, “can we go now?”

“Yeah,” Law says, “yeah,” and smiles crookedly at him. Feels like a fool for how easily Luffy sways him, for how much such a simple thing matters, only; he doesn’t regret it, feels lighter for it, Strawhat’s simpler world superimposed onto his own.

The object of his affections jumps up from the bed, hat swinging on its string, cries, “All right!” and bounces out the door leading into the hall. Law trails after, picks up the keys from the table and locks the door behind them.

Strawhat bounds down the hall and Law walks after, hands tucked in his pockets, half-smiling. One demon of the lot laid to rest for the night, and something gained; even if is, really, just in his reflection.


End file.
